Most of today's electronic equipment use arrays of connectors on a circuit board such as a motherboard or back plane to mate with a plurality of complementary connectors on corresponding daughter cards. It is desirable in forming the arrays of connectors to use a minimum amount of real estate on the board so that the electronic equipment may be as compact as possible.
In some instances the same mother board or back plane may be used in various apparatus that use a daughter card having different capabilities, such as, for example, upgrading existing equipment. The upgraded daughter card connectors may require additional grounding capabilities than is available in the mother board connector. It is desirable, therefore, to provide or to retrofit selected connectors on the motherboard with additional grounding capability. In some motherboard and daughter card arrangements, only certain connectors of the daughter card include ground shielding that needs to be electrically connected to ground circuits on the motherboard. It is desirable, therefore, to provide only selected motherboard connectors with the ground capability thus allowing the daughter cards having the ground shield connectors to be electrically connected to the ground circuits of the board.